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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27691763">The Night We Met</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyleaguenerd/pseuds/ivyleaguenerd'>ivyleaguenerd</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Men's Hockey RPF</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Car Accidents, Character Death, Flashbacks, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mentions of hospitals, Not Beta Read, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, but i'm not once again, i cried the entire time i wrote this, mentions of quarantine, no beta we die like men, so i would apologize, so you can cry reading it, too soon?</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 02:35:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,093</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27691763</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyleaguenerd/pseuds/ivyleaguenerd</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>based off of the song 'The Night We Met' by Lord Huron after I got stuck in a whirlwind trance state of mind just typing.</p><p>Connor swears that Dylan is right there. Until he's not anywhere to be found, and it's freezing cold again.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Connor McDavid/Dylan Strome, Past Connor McDavid/Dylan Strome</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Night We Met</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>
    <span>I am not the only traveler who has not yet repaid his debt,</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Reaching 24 years old is the better version of hitting 21 because it just solidifies the fact that he can drink legally and everyone loves to reach the age of golden drinking. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Yet it’s the evening on the thirteenth of January, and Connor couldn’t find a beer in his damned house if he wrecked the whole thing searching. Not a beer in his hand, none in his stomach, and none in the vicinity of where he sat on his balcony. He didn’t plan on grabbing one, either. He wasn’t going to the convenience store later to pick some up, he wasn’t calling a friend to come with him and celebrate. There was no cake, no cupcakes, no form of sweets typically expected at a birthday celebration. No balloons, streamers, signs, posters, no cards or presents either. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>This was because everyone knew that Connor had recently lost his greatest gift, his largest sweet tooth in life, the man who got him drunk off of just one glance. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Dylan William Strome. March 7th, 1997 - March 17th, 2020.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>At least, that was what the card in the back of his clear phone case read. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>I’ve been searching for a trail to follow again, </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Sometimes he could have sworn that he would enter certain parts of the house and feel the same warmth that Dylan’s hugs gave him. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Maybe it was stronger when he would drive to the store, and wore Dylan’s stupid scruffy feeling scarf with the terrible combination of deep maroons, wintergreens, and sunshine yellows all knit together with wool that must have been older than his own grandmother.  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>When he’d sit by the lake in Erie, near the edge of the Erieau docks at the yacht club. Just swinging his feet over the edge at low tide, enjoying the way his toes just grazed the surface of the water. Laying on his back against the rough wood the docks were made of, he’d stare up at the sky and swear he could feel Dylan’s hand in his. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Then he’d look over and Dylan would be there, and the stupid smirk would be riding his lips as they locked eyes. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Until Connor would blink, at the sound of his name being called by the owner of the docks asking if he was hungry or needed anything from him. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Take me back to the night we met</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It was so vivid, so strong, so close to him, the imagery of the night he met Dylan. Frame by frame, he could relive the day until he died. He probably would, if he hadn’t been scolded every time he confessed that his head had drifted back to that night, and then threatened about getting checked into a mental hospital every time he spent more than ten minutes with his mother. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They had seen one another again at the Erie Otters training camp, not even expecting that when they had both been given the list of OHL options, they’d end up together again for training camp that late summer. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>A simple shake was how they greeted each other before they made it to the locker rooms afterward, where they’d embraced one another. In a hug that Connor could practically feel as passionately as he pictured it if he wrapped himself up in his comforter before bed. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Connor was seventeen, so he had his driver’s license early and was the one who offered to take them out to the docks. The newspaper that sat on his dining room table that he just barely glanced at had informed him of the fact that they’d be able to see the stars nice and clearly across the night sky that evening. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Once they parked in the grass patch across the street from the clubhouse, Connor took Dylan’s hand and walked beside him in the breeze of the evening toward the gates of the docks. Upon stepping out onto the docks and inhaling at the slight shift of it moving on the waters, Connor had led by example by sliding his shoes off and taking his socks off to stuff them inside his shoes. He placed them somewhere in the middle of the dock, to keep from the risk of becoming fish feed. Slipping his phone in one of his shoes as well, and his keys and dropped his hat over the pair of shoes. Dylan did something very similar in nature, before sitting beside where Connor was at the edge. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Is that the little dipper, or am I losing it?” Dylan muttered, and Connor just laughed, never understanding why Dylan said half of the shit he did.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“It’s your hand, see, it’s totally your hand,” Connor held a finger up as he pointed to some random cluster of stars they gazed at, and he giggled as he mocked Dylan for his comment. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I think it looks a lot more like your lips, here, turn to me so I can try to compare the two,” Dylan nodded over to encourage Connor, who was just staring back with his mouth agape and his eyes stuck on the wood beneath their rears. Connor couldn’t face Dylan after hearing something like that, something so innocently flirty, but devious in it’s Dylan Strome derivatives. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Oh yeah, they’re the same. Wow Davo, got a whole constellation of your lips. That’s how stunning they are, the big man above threw an exact image of them into the sky.” Dylan smirked, looking back and forth between the sky to Connor’s mouth as if actually comparing the scattered dots of light to the points and peaks of Connor’s lips. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Connor remained shocked with his cheeks bursting in the heat of his blush, and his mouth feeling as if a weight hung it out and open like it was. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I feel like if I looked hard enough, I’d just see all of you up in the stars. Cause you’re that bright in my life, just like a star.” Dylan added, before leaning a little closer to Connor. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Connor didn’t feel as though he was the one fully controlling his body as he leaned in toward it, pressing his lips against the chapped lips of Dylan. Not making sense of how Dylan’s hand went to the back of his head, cradling the nape of it with a thumb brushing back and forth in his tail of his ginger locks. Barely recalling how he’d gained the courage to mirror the motion, yet with his hand clutching Dylan’s trapezius as if he never wanted to part from the moment. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>I had all then most of you, some and now none of you.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Take me back to the night we met. </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The obnoxious beeping of his alarm clock went off, as he swung around in his bed to slam his hand down on top of it’s off button and silence the protruding noise from preventing his dreams any longer. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The other side of the bed was still empty, he couldn’t go back to sleep now and Dylan had been torn from him once again. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Every morning, it felt as though it was happening all over again. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>When the night was full of terrors, and your eyes were filled with tears</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Dylan and Connor were trying their best to cope with the scary terms of the new guidelines to their lives, as the declaration of a pandemic had prevented them from hockey, friends, gatherings, social events, and any realistic levels of social interaction that worked for them. They were lovers, everyone knew that if in the same room with another, they were all over each other. So the calls and demands for distancing, quarantining, and hands-off would not fly for a date to occur on their anniversary. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Dylan picked up a bundle of roses, mixed those with a handful of beautiful wildflowers that had bloomed in bright oranges before they were thrown into some fancy opal looking vase. He buckled it into the passenger seat of his car, turning the air on before buckling himself in to leave. The text he sent upon his departure read: On my way now, see you soon baby, love you :)!!</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Connor’s chest felt like it was moving a million miles a minute, as he read the words in the text bubble over and over again. For personal memory’s sake, he screenshotted the message, and he double tapped it to like it before responding with a loving warning to drive safely. Skipping into the bedroom, he made fast timing on changing his shirt because he assumed the one he was wearing had to have stunk. Dylan loved to tease him for being so blind to the various rotting smells his gear produced, and would even offer assistance in washing and drying it out. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Dylan was just leaving the parking lot to the corner store as he felt his phone abruptly start to buzz, he was getting a phone call. Which immediately bothered him, as he was actively driving among plenty of other cars and was supposed to attempt to stay focused. Not that he ever drove with intentions of slacking off or spacing out, it was just crucial with the way the backroads in Canada tended to sprawl around. So he ignored the call the first time he had felt its notification pester his lap, and put his blinker on so he could begin the backroad route to Connor’s. Now that he was off of the main streets and away from the shopping centers, Connor was a good twenty minutes of backroads. Which only made him eager to kick his speed up a notch. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The phone started buzzing again, and Dylan sighed. If someone genuinely needed to get to him this badly, they didn’t seem to like having to wait as a temporary response. Even against his comforts, Dylan tried to figure out how to lift his thigh so he could reach for his phone from his pocket, and he pressed one of his feet into the carpeted space under the wheel. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>All within a few seconds, Dylan was feeling the speed of the car pick up, and then he was watching his phone squirm from his grip before everything began spinning. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Then he couldn’t feel anything at all, and he just wished he had known why nothing was coming out when he spoke. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Tons of questions came flushing in as he remained in that car seat, breathing shallowly as the sun crept down the horizon and hid his car. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>In anticipation of Dylan’s arrival, Connor had clicked into the messages he shared with Dylan. They had one another’s location on and shared it constantly to make sure the two when not traveling together were getting where they needed to go safely. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Upon a glance, it bounced Dylan’s contact photo from the convenience store over in the midst of the city to a section of the backroad route that was buried in the woods. Every time Dylan took his drive over, Connor would scold him for making it there using the off-map paths and never minding his moose warnings. The issue was that this time, Dylan’s contact had looked to be still in that section of the woods. As in, the picture stopped and had seemed to come to a halt in that exact spot. Which looked to be more off of the actual path of the road rather than on the road, so Connor exited the app before entering it again. There it sat, the little icon of Dylan with his tongue out and hood tied up to his chin, blinking as if to say; ‘No, your eyes don’t deceive you, he’s right here alongside the road that you always bombard him for using.’</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>With a shaky exhale, Connor’s thumb hovered the little symbol that would call Dylan. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It rang and rang, and it rang some more until he heard the voicemail that he and Dylan had recorded back a few years ago come to tell him the worst suspicions he’d been drafting were a little more on target than he’d wanted them to be. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>So in hopes of having it be a false measure taken, he dialed for the police, ambulances, cops, whatever he could get to come as he rushed in a worn-out Oilers Nation shirt, sweats, and a lack of socks with his shoes to get in his own car. Maybe they’d all get there at the same time, and see Dylan was just pulled over to take some pictures. Maybe he was on the phone with someone else? Maybe he stopped to check something wrong with the car or was stopped to help someone else? Maybe the phone hadn’t been on his lap, or in his right pocket where it usually was. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>And your eyes were filled with tears, </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The last thing Dylan did see was only after someone had lifted his eyelids open to see if they were reactive, and it was thankfully Connor’s face. Yet he didn’t look happy to see Dylan at all, his brows furrowed and tears falling down his cheeks, hair slicked with sweat and face red with tension. Where did the flowers he bought for Connor go? </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Please, please, oh my gosh, Dylan, Dylan, I’m here, I-I love you so much Dylan,” Connor was sputtering like a tank running on it’s last few drops, just to get the words out. He was using the last of his air in his lungs just to make sure Dylan knew he was loved. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>When you had not touched me yet, </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“You have to stand back, sir, you can’t touch him right now because of the condition he’s in,” One of the nurses beside Dylan’s bloodied and limp body informed, and another one continued to plead with him to step away. So he stood patiently by the ambulance, waiting for them to pop Dylan up onto a stretcher and get him to the hospital for some surgeries and life-saving business to occur. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They never did. Someone took his phone, called his mom and dad to come and find him, and bagged Dylan up before he ever had a chance to say goodbye. Long before he ever intended to say goodbye, and informed him of the many outlets they had in terms of taking action against what had happened to Dylan. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Oh, take me back to the night we met. </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Connor’s mouth gaped as he inhaled a drastically needed breath after his head popped up from under the water he had been shoved into. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Dylan! What the hell, man, I could have drowned! How do you know whether or not I can swim?!” What would you have done, huh- stop laughing at me!” Connor yelped, preparing an attack to splash Dylan’s legs while they still hung over the side of the docks. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Your hair, your hair Con, it’s all messed up from the water and you look like, like a chicken right now, Con,” Dylan’s breathlessness came from the way he chuckled at the sight, of his now established boyfriend who was bobbing in the water all while throwing a hissy fit over being shoved in. “It’s the best damn look of yours I’ve ever seen,” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Connor crossed his arms over his chest for a second, trying to come up with a revenge plan. Taking a quick glance at the pair of feet belonging to Dylan that’d just been drifting the skim surface of the waters, he darted a hand out to grab hold of an ankle and attempted to use all of his might in his upper body to yank the other man in with him. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Oh, come on, Connor! Now, I’m gonna have to drown you,” Dylan grumbled as soon as he made his way to the surface, splashing at Connor in his own surge of shame. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Catch me if you can!” Connor giggled bright with pride that came from his success as he turned away from Dylan to dive under, and attempt his fastest escape plan ever. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, haunted by the ghost of you</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Sometimes Connor couldn’t eat in the kitchen because Dylan always reminded him of how good it was to eat without any distractions. Once he realized why he couldn’t seem to sit in the kitchen and have his breakfast, a bowl of cereal, or pancakes, whatever it may have been, he would lose his appetite entirely. The voice in his head would tell him that there had only been a few bites left, or that it was important for him to fuel his body with good eats. He’d open the fridge in an attempt to try to get some sort of vitamins in his body, maybe to add some energy to his mind and soul, and he jumped as he opened the fridge because he could have sworn it was Dylan’s hand that darted out in front of his in a race to get the orange juice. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Now he was becoming certain that the voice in his head was Dylan, or that it sounded too much like him to be anyone else. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>So he closed the fridge and could swear he was actually seeing Dylan, once again just leaning with his lower back against the kitchen countertop by the sink to enjoy his orange juice. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Dylan?” Connor whispered, shaky and thready as he felt as though he was barely holding onto reality, questioning if his feet were actually connected to the cold tiled floor. The possibility that it was Dylan standing before him in his kitchen made his urge to grab for the counter strong, he wanted to feel something real and follow instructions like his therapist tried to teach him. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Whatever Dylan had responded with was inaudible to Connor, so he turned his back on Dylan to grab for a notepad and a pen. But now, once again, like it always had seemed to go, Dylan was gone. Again, the room felt as though it was rushed with a burst of freezing cold air.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Even in the bathroom with a heated floor, the cloud of chilled air followed his feet in there. He locked the door behind him as he sunk to the floor, cradled himself in a ball that consisted of his legs and chest to just let tears fall. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>All of his energy, his time, patience, heart, and soul had been combined to put his efforts toward envisioning the night he first was held by Dylan, trying to void the connotation of the last time he’d held Dylan. </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>sorry to tyson: who begged that i let dylan live and i just make it anything but this, but uh, you get what you get and you don't get upset unless you do, then... same. </p><p>anyways,<br/>can you tell i'm mouring and the song absolutely struck a chord?<br/>the song is beautiful, simple and short but it just hurts if you've ever lost anyone you're close to. whether it be an actual death or a breakup, friendship, player, etc.<br/>oh i declare that it's totally fine if it doesn't make sense because sometimes writing can also be a good emotional release. </p><p>anyways, sorry again tys, hope you're not still crying by the time you see these notes.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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